From Welfare Lines to Commuting Crush

Here they come, joining America’s rush hour. Greet a new national phenomenon--the welfare commuter.

Prodded by reform-minded federal lawmakers to get off aid and get a job, millions of erstwhile welfare recipients in Southern California and across the nation will be scrambling in the coming months to get from home to work.

It won’t be easy. Although two-thirds of all new jobs in the nation have sprouted in the suburbs, three-quarters of welfare recipients live in central cities or rural areas. And just one in 20 nationwide owns a car.

The result, experts say, will be onerous commutes for some newcomers to the work force, a time-consuming roadblock that could cause America’s revamped welfare system to wheeze and cough like an old clunker.

That commuting dilemma, said one federal transportation official, “has risen up, along with day care and job training, to be one of the most significant challenges to welfare reform.”

From Washington to the West Coast, urban planners and transportation experts are struggling for solutions.

The Clinton administration has budgeted $600 million for the next six years to spark innovative transportation alternatives for workers coming off welfare, but Congress has balked at the price tag. The Labor Department has $3 billion to help welfare recipients make the transition into the work force, though it is unclear how much will go to smooth their commutes.

Some states have introduced jitneys and vanpools to hasten the commute from the inner city to jobs in the suburbs. Others have begun buffing up their bus systems. One rural county in Tennessee has started helping welfare families with no-interest automobile loans. Kentucky is leasing old police cruisers and other government vehicles at low cost to people moving from welfare to work.

In California, where welfare reform plans were finally cemented this summer, officials are only now beginning to grapple with welfare commuting. They are considering options ranging from expanded carpooling and shuttle service to innovative programs to put former welfare recipients behind the wheels of their own cars.

Nowhere is the challenge as great as in Southern California, particularly in Los Angeles County, which has a bigger caseload than 48 states.

In the county, 155,000 new workers are expected to leave the welfare rolls between 1999 and 2003, while 142,000 new entry-level jobs are anticipated, according to the Southern California Assn. of Governments. The gap is expected to be even larger in San Bernardino County, where new workers will outnumber entry-level jobs by more than 16,000.

Ventura and Orange counties anticipate big job gains in the coming years. Orange County should produce more than 50,000 new entry-level jobs but only 20,000 workers coming off welfare, the association says. Ventura County is expected to have a surplus of nearly 6,000 low-wage jobs.

Given the job disparities among the counties, many former welfare recipients may opt to commute far from home for jobs.

But some experts believe that most will manage to find work relatively close to home, given the costs and gloomy payoff of long commutes to entry-level jobs. And some of those who can’t find private sector employment will be absorbed by community service jobs provided by the government.

“Facing a big commute, many people will balk,” said Brian Taylor, a UCLA assistant professor of urban planning. “That’s not lazy, that’s rational. You’re better off hustling to pick up a little here or there nearer home.”

Even in town, the commuting prospects can be grim, especially for the large numbers that rely on public transit. Just take a bus ride across South Los Angeles with Zakiya Kyle.

Kyle is 26, a single mother of two young boys. While attending Cal State Long Beach, she became pregnant with her first son. A proud woman whose family had never taken a penny in public assistance, she was forced by circumstances onto the welfare rolls. She describes the experience as “hellish.”

Now happily employed by a nonprofit drug prevention program, she has a new hell--her daily commute.

At 6 a.m. she is at the bus stop with her children, 14-month-old Ishmael typically asleep on her shoulder. Two buses later she drops off 5-year-old Mustafa at school in Inglewood. Then she rides two more buses to get Ishmael to his baby sitter in Watts. From there it is half an hour to work.

Kyle arrives about 9 a.m., three hours and six buses after starting.

“The boys and I read, we play games, we talk to other people, we spend the time however we can,” she said. “In L.A. County, it’s very difficult to live without a car.”

Kyle’s conclusion echoes the beliefs of some transportation experts.

In Southern California, where just one of every five welfare recipients has access to an automobile, some believe that the easiest commuting solution would be to supply everyone with a car. A recent UCLA study found that a car was the single biggest factor in low-income people getting a job.

“If we want people to be self-sufficient, we have to give them the tools,” said Paul Ong, UCLA urban planning department chairman. “Car ownership is one of those tools.”

But he and most other planners agree that a program offering automobiles to the poor would prove politically unpalatable, attacked from the left as environmentally unfriendly and from the right as a government giveaway.

Still, no less a conservative than Eloise Anderson, a former welfare mother who now serves as Gov. Pete Wilson’s social services chief, sees the automobile as one part of the solution. She suggests that charities could collect used cars, have welfare workers fix them to learn marketable mechanical skills and then auction them off at low cost to other people coming off government aid.

“I just think we’re going to have to be creative to overcome some of these problems,” Anderson said.

Aside from reliance on the car, Los Angeles is different from older cities in the East and Midwest, where the growth of jobs in the suburbs far from impoverished central cities has created a “spatial mismatch” that urban planners first identified in the early 1960s. In Cleveland, a study found that more than half the area’s available entry-level jobs require a commute of 80 minutes or more on public transit for inner-city residents.

Federal officials are promoting “reverse commutes,” using vanpools and shuttle buses to tote workers coming of welfare from their downtown homes to jobs in the suburbs. A demonstration project, dubbed Bridges to Work, has begun transporting impoverished workers to jobs in business parks near Chicago and several other cities.

“If a low-wage worker faces a long commute, that job might as well be on Mars,” said Mark Allen Hughes, a former Princeton University professor shepherding the Bridges to Work project. “But a two-hour commute on public transit can be reduced to 30 or 45 minutes with a little engineering.”

That may not prove simple in the sprawl of Southern California, with its scattered urban villages, office parks and industrial pockets. In Los Angeles, “everyone commutes, so everyone has a sort of spatial mismatch from their jobs,” said Manuel Pastor, an economist at UC Santa Cruz.

With myriad commute patterns crisscrossing the metropolis, it is difficult for planners to target an easy fix.

“Los Angeles County is not typical of anyplace else,” said Jim McLaughlin, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s deputy executive director. “We’re in the discovery phase of trying to understand what needs to be done.”

Some difficulties are easy to predict.

Many people coming off welfare will land in jobs with graveyard hours or weekend shifts, times when public transit operates on a reduced schedule. The intricacies of juggling child care with work make commuting all the more difficult.

“We have to nail it down so transit is servicing those people at those times,” said Raul Ramirez of the Los Angeles County social services agency.

Some former welfare recipients may move closer to jobs. But sociologists expect many to remain rooted in the inner city, with its support network of family, friends and familiar culture.

If they choose to relocate, experts say, they face daunting obstacles in the suburbs, including fewer apartments, higher rents and possible racial or class-related tensions.

Meanwhile, the most obvious solution--stimulating job growth in the central cities--has largely failed in Los Angeles and elsewhere, academicians say. New industry has been drawn to the suburbs--which often have less crime and cheaper land--and reversing that trend has proved difficult.

So the answer, experts say, may be making commutes more manageable for former welfare recipients--and everyone else.

Here are some remedies under discussion:

* Expanding carpooling--It is already a common practice among the working poor. A study in South-Central Los Angeles found that a quarter of lower-income workers carpool, while one in five takes the bus. In Santa Ana, one in three carpools. The Southland governments association already has a computer filled with 500,000 carpoolers, and nearly one in five of those lives in a high-welfare area. “We think carpools may turn out to be the major opportunity here,” said Jim Simms, head of the association’s ride-sharing section.

* Beefing up the bus network--Los Angeles County’s bus system is one of the nation’s busiest but has been criticized for inadequately targeting low-wage employment centers. The bus fleet has been cut 30% over the last decade, with money shifted to trolleys and the subway.

But change is in the works. The MTA will vote Oct. 23 on a plan to expand service as part of last year’s settlement of a lawsuit by the activist Bus Riders Union. About 150 new buses and 18 additional routes are envisioned.

* Maximizing van use--Federal officials say the nation’s armada of vans is ready, waiting and underutilized. They endorse having vans now used by churches, senior centers and programs for the disabled enlisted in off hours to ferry welfare commuters.

Los Angeles is experimenting with just such a program in its Smart Shuttle. Some planners also say shuttles instituted by some suburban employers to meet Southern California’s air quality regulations could prove useful for transporting welfare workers.

* Innovation and coordination--The computer will help here. Simms said that for less than the cost of a new 42-seat bus every welfare caseworker in Los Angeles County could be outfitted with software to help design feasible commutes. Need a carpool? The computer spits out a list. Want a bus route? The computer tells you the line and times.

“This is a unique opportunity for us to start fresh and make sure we maximize the use of all our resources,” said the MTA’s McLaughlin. “That’s what it will take.”

Times staff writer Melissa Healy in Washington contributed to this story.

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Welfare to Work

Like many other metropolitan regions around the country, Southern California has a disparity between the projected concentrations of entry-level jobs and where welfare recipients live. This mismatch, some experts say, will create lengthy commutes that could deter welfare recipients from keeping jobs.

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Here is a look at the number of new workers to be created in 1999-2003 and anticipated entry-level jobs in six counties:

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County New workers Projected jobs Imperial 3.949 1,413 Los Angeles 155,106 142,909 Orange 19,747 50,175 Riverside 21,542 16,238 San Bernardino 35,904 19,796 Ventura 5,386 11,103 Total 241,634 241,634

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Source: Southern California Assn. of Governments